Allan Appel Photo
When long-awaited news hit Grand Avenue Tuesday morning — that the feds arrested four East Haven cops accused of harassing and brutalizing Latinos and lying about it — it was met with two reactions: It’s about time. And it’s not just in one suburban town.
“It happens in West Haven. It happens in North Haven. It’s a bigger problem. It’s in the U.S.,” said one of five customers already filling chairs at El Jibaro on Grand near Poplar along New Haven’s main Latino commercial strip.
Click here to read the indictment against the four East Haven cops, released Tuesday. (Click here for a background story.)
“It’s good news for me,” said Luis M. Carrasquillo (pictured), the only one of six barbers not attending to a customer shortly after 10 a.m. Then he told his own story of an encounter with the cops — not in East Haven, but here in New Haven. About a month ago five officers grabbed him as he left a bar on Grand Avenue around 11 p.m. “They handcuffed me and put me int he back and pushed me around a bit. They said they were looking for someone who matched me.” Twenty minutes later he was released and shaken by how he was handled, he said. (State records show he ‘d been arrested once, and convicted, on a risk of injury charge back in 2007.)
Over at A’s Barber Shop at Grand near Clinton, haircutter Josh Nunez was sweeping a back room in preparation for the arrival of customers.
“I know people in East Haven. It’s good,” he said of Tuesday’s arrests. “It’s very good.” Nunez said he lives in East Haven. He said he knows five Latinos who were stopped because of their race, he said, and given tickets or were arrested. “That’s discrimination.”
The federal Justice Department agreed that the department has engaged a pattern of such discrimination for years, targeting Latino drivers, stopping them on pretexts, roughing them up, ticketing them disproportionately, and lying in police reports and generally covering up violent actions by the force.
Federal agents arrested the four members of the East Haven police department earlier Tuesday morning.
A grand jury indictment dated Jan. 18 states that the four officers conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate various members of the East Haven community.” The indictment names a sergeant, John Miller, and three officers, David Cari, Dennis Spaulding, and Jason Zullo. The three often worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift under the supervision of Sgt. Miller. They and others were known as “Miller’s Boys,” according to the indictment.
Together, the four men performed illegal searches and seizures and used “unreasonable force” with impunity, the indictment charges. As part of the conspiracy, they filed false reports and harassed and intimidated not only victims but fellow officers, the indictment states.
The indictment states that Miller used his position as a police union leader to further the conspiracy. All four officers assaulted people while they were handcuffed, according to the indictment.
The indictment outlines numerous incidences of physical abuse of arrestees, illegal searches, false arrests, threats, intimidation and efforts to conceal the abuses. On Nov. 22, 2008, for example, Spaulding threw a Latino man to the ground outside a Latino-owned East Haven restaurant, cutting his chin deeply, then repeatedly kicked the man, who was in handcuffs.
The indictment also refers to three “unindicted co-conspirators” in the ongoing investigation.” An East Haven official, in this Hartford Courant story, identified one of those officials as Chief Leonard Gallo.